In today’s world of logistics, there are hundreds of thousands of warehouses all over the globe. Believe it or not, they are all connected one way or another and essentially keep the supply chain moving as goods travel from one warehouse into another. Goods arrive from all sorts of options such as large cargo ships, cargo planes, 18-wheeler trucks, to small delivery vans, ultimately ending up in the consumers' hands. Amidst all this movement through the supply chain, multiple businesses, especially third-party logistics (3PL) warehouses, profit from these different verticals.
The lifeline of the warehousing world thrives on verticals, meaning warehouses profit from the services they offer at their facilities. The more services you add to your capabilities, the more profitable your warehouse will be—if you can capture all the charges accurately. I am specifically talking about multi-vertical warehouse capture.
Every business is different in the aspect of how it operates. For example, a warehouse that does storage only focuses on the low hanging fruit and sees its verticals from charges like inbound, palletization, sorting, crossdocking, transloading, returns, banding, shrink wrapping, storage by weight or dimensions, tiered storage, and outbound.
Others may be focused on the more complex margins from ecommerce fulfillment that has various types of verticals. These can include order processing fees, carton vs. case picking, kitting, small parcel shipping, overnight requests, tiered volume of order charges, order SKU quantities, custom packaging and many more.
Some may be doing hazmat, cold storage, or pharmaceuticals which includes things like serial number tracking, expiration dates, manufacturing dates or lot number capturing. With so many verticals out there, warehouses are capitalizing on the opportunity to become hybrid locations, meaning they offer a ton of different customer-specific services.
Regardless of whether you are a simple warehouse doing one type of workflow or a hybrid offering all types, there is one main underlying factor: how to capture all of these services and their related charges.
With so much happening day to day, even hour to hour, there are so many dollars and even cents floating around in the warehouse to be grabbed. How can a warehouse know they are grabbing all the profits they can? Quite often, without even knowing it, warehouses miss out on thousands of dollars every year by not having the capability to capture all this revenue. The result is that they end up sending invoices that don’t accurately reflect all the labor done by the warehouse.
Our goal is to make sure warehouses operate smoothly and are extremely profitable using our platform. From my experience working with warehouses who are interested in Extensiv’s offerings, the first questions I ask when it comes to revenue are: What is the process like? Are you writing things down on pen and paper? How do you record each transaction and make sure you are not missing anything? How much time are you spending on billing per week?
This is where things usually get a little spotted. More than half the time they tell me they are physically writing charges down on paper and manually translating them to their accounting software or Excel.
Billing is a high priority of any 3PL warehouse. It is the difference between keeping a customer or losing a customer, staying in business, or going out of it. As if capturing all these different services happening daily wasn’t tough enough, here comes another curveball.
SURPRISE! More often than not, not all customers of a 3PL warehouse want to be billed the same way. Some customers may keep things easy and want a summary of the monthly charges. Others may want invoices that include an itemized charge by each individual transaction (inbound/outbound orders) while others may want various invoices such as one for storage, inbound, outbound, kitting services, small parcel labels charged, etcetera. Yikes!
Well, we are happy to say that we have a solution for you…
Extensiv offers a painless and paperless, automated billing process for 3PL warehouses—meaning, no need to write anything down on Post-It notes or a napkin (although some of the greatest ideas began on a cocktail napkin!) or worry about forgetting to save an Excel file and literally losing profits from human error. We will set up customer profiles and all the billing charges unique to that customer. This allows you to not only accommodate various workflows but also charge for every unique service happening under the roof of the warehouse.
For example, maybe customer A is your best friend and most loyal customer. So, you give them better rates on storage, picking, packing, palletization, etc. Maybe customer B is a new customer doing low volume, so you want to offer them different rates that can keep their costs low and allow them to grow and build a stronger relationship with you as they expand their business. That is how unique and flexible our billing capabilities are.
All of these charges are being recorded for you automatically right inside Extensiv’s 3PL Warehouse Manager platform, broken down by customer, dates, and types of services in various formats. No need to have various Excel files or disparate software systems. Our goal is to reduce the number of platforms you need to use to run your business and make things simple for you and your customers.
Extensiv is currently working on a new Billing Manager offering that will allow businesses to accept payments from their customers directly through the Extensiv Hub, which means warehouses can get paid much faster, similar to how SaaS billing models work. A few more things are also in the works regarding the new offering, but we will be covering more on that later.
If you are interested in Extensiv’s warehouse management solutions, we would love to chat with you—schedule a demo today!
